Universal deafness

"When the going gets tough, the tough get blogging"
-- Christopher Buckley

I was talking to a friend about graphomania. He had never heard the word, and in the din of the fine restaurant where we were dining, he strained his ears, already damaged by years of rocking and rolling, to understand its components. I had to spell it out for him. G-R-A-P-H-O-M-A-N-I-A. (Графомания in Russian.) The Online Medical Dictionary defines the affliction thus:

Morbid and excessive impulse to write.

(In the age of universal blogging, the Big Pharma could cash in on this mania by developing Prozac-like drugs to cure it. There are 100 million bloggers/potential patients out there to be overmedicated. Again.)

In any event, I wasn't surprised by my esteemed friend's ignorance of the concept, as obsession with graphomania is a European thing. Call it graphomania mania. It is a concern of the literati there, the writers, the critics, the elites of the written word. My friend and I agreed that the concept originates from centuries old traditions in Europe of limiting access to professions and crafts to pre-screened, experienced and worthy individuals. One has to apprentice for years and years before becoming a craftsman himself. Writers, poets, composers, artists, are born, not made, and they are inspired by the gods on Mount Olympus, or the Muses, is an all too common belief across the Big Pond.

This is of course good and bad, as it serves to produce high quality art, but on the other hand it arbitrarily limits access to the tools of the trades and the audiences. In a democratic, egalitarian America, anyone can call himself a writer, artist or composer, and let the market decide, we say, as everything here is treated as a marketable product, including your own pitiful self. The barriers to entry exist here as well, let's not kid ourselves, but they don't usually involve years of apprenticeship.

A security guard where I hang my hat has just published a novel with a publishing house that is regarded in the publishing industry as a 'vanity press' (though they didn't charge him for it as is customary, except for the copies he ordered himself. It is a new kind of vanity press called POD, or Print On Demand publisher.) The father of my dinner companion had published his memoirs as a vanity press project, distributed them to his family members, and provoked a mini storm with his self-serving distortions. Outside the restaurant where we were dining that evening, on power utility poles hung advertising flyers from writing coaches, teachers, and editors. American psychoanalysts recommend writing as therapy.

The question of blogging as graphomania has been raised by others, and you can find discussions of it elsewhere. Before I sign off to work on the next posts for my two blogs, and then the next ones after those, I will only cite a quote on graphomania by the Czech writer Milan Kundera from his 1978 book The Book of Laughter and Forgetting:

Graphomania is not a mania to write letters, personal diaries, or family chronicles (to write for oneself or one’s close relations) but a mania to write books (to have a public of unknown readers). … Graphomania (a mania for writing books) inevitably takes on epidemic proportions when a society devlops to the point of creating three basic conditions:

1. an elevated level of general well-being, which allows people to devote themselves to useless activities;
2. a high degree of social atomization and, as a consequence, a general isoalation of individuals;
3. the absense of dramatic social changes in the nation’s internal life. (From this point of view, it seems to me symptomatic that in France, where practically nothing happens, the percentage of writers is twenty-one times higher than in Israel.

.. The mainspring that drives her to write is just that absence of vital content, that void. But by a backlash, the effort affects the cause. General isolation breeds graphomania, and generalized graphomania in turn intensifies and worsens isolation. The invention of printing formerly enabled people to understand one another. In the era of universal graphomania, the writing of books has an opposite meaning: everyone surrounded by his own words as by a wall of mirrors, which allows no voice to filter through from outside. … One morning (and it will be soon), when everyone wakes up as a writer, the age of universal deafness and incomprehension will have arrived.